Quality - The Alignment Case
When your organization’s capabilities are equal to the demands placed on it by customers, The Voice of the Employee and The Voice of the Process are aligned with The Voice of the Customer. The relationship is steady and your growth and profitability advance at a moderately healthy pace.
Should your capabilities lag behind customer requirements, however, The Voice of the Employee and The Voice of the Process fall out of alignment with The Voice of the Customer, and you are confronted with a Rework gap.
Your organization can’t routinely satisfy its customers and must go to extraordinary lengths (e.g. recall and repair of defective products or make good on services delivered unsatisfactorily) just to sustain the relationship. As a result growth and profitability suffer.
Once the rework gap has been closed, your organization may move out of alignment in the other direction – your capabilities might run ahead of customers’ current requirements. When this happens, you create what we call an Opportunity Gap. Your organization not only routinely satisfies customers’’ current requirements, it is ready and able to meet needs that customers have not yet stated or perhaps, even imagined.
The Opportunity Gap represents your organization’s ability to make insightful, educated guesses about customers’ unstated and anticipated needs, so you can provide unexpected elements of product, service, or relationship quality that customers will immediately and intrinsically value. It is about delighting customers, as opposed merely satisfying them. Most of all, it is about leading the market place, opposed to following it.
In terms of competitive advantage, we see that organizations actually pursue two kinds of quality goals. Defensive quality goals are reactive. They are aimed at closing the Rework Gap- bringing process and employee capabilities at par with customer requirements. Rather than leading the market place the organization is trying to catch up with it. When the organization opens up an Opportunity Gap, however, it can proactively pursue Offensive quality goals that will favorably distance it from competitors in the mind of market place, drive customer retention and new business growth, and lessen pressures to compete on the basis of price, there by increasing long term profitability.
Once your organization delights its customers with unexpected value, their base requirements will rise to this new level of expectation. The Long-term growth and Profit becomes solid indicating that the Voice of the Process and The Voice of the Employee are again in alignment with The Voice of the Customer, albeit at a new higher level.
Like the Olympic high jumper who sets a new world record, you have forever raised the bar. From now on this is the level of performance and value your customers will expect from you.
The message can be summarized in five fundamental points given below:
Quality is free.
The slogan had been popularized by Philip Crosby. It is always expensive to run out-of –control work processes that it is to invest in quality approaches designed to bring work processes under control.
Quality is a management problem.
Poor quality is caused by flawed management systems and managers would have to lead the way to solutions.
The company must focus everything on customer.
Employees should think of fellow employees as internal customers. By meeting fellow employees’ valid customer requirements, everyone could help meet the needs of the external customers served by the company.
Quality is continuous improvement.
The status quo is never good enough. Quality companies constantly strive to be better, and gladly accept that their efforts to improve quality will never end.
Quality requires cultural change.
Don’t bother looking for quick-fixes or shortcuts.
